Among the five senses, smell in art has historically been relegated to the background. While sight and hearing dominate conventional artistic experiences, scent has remained a marginal element. This isn’t by chance: we live in a deeply visual culture that has historically associated knowledge with sight. To see is to understand, they say. And yet, to smell can also be a way of knowing.
Museums, with their controlled environments and strict conservation rules, rarely allow scent to enter the picture. White, neutral, standardized rooms suppress any smell that might alter perception. But that neutrality also erases a rich and meaningful sensory dimension.
The expressive potential of scent
Smell has a direct link to memory and emotion. A scent can instantly transport us to a place, a childhood scene, a beloved body. It is a sense that activates brain areas connected to the intimate and the profound, yet it is rarely given prominence in the artistic field.
What happens if we incorporate smell in artistic creation as a language in itself, not just as a complement but as a main material?
The answer isn’t simple, but it opens fertile ground for contemporary experimentation.
Experiences that smell: olfactory art in practice
Some contemporary artists have begun to seriously explore this dimension. Clara Ursitti, for instance, has developed installations where scent is the central element. Instead of observing an image or listening to a sound, the viewer breathes an atmosphere crafted from carefully selected essences. The invisible becomes presence.
Another remarkable case is Sissel Tolaas, who has worked with urban aromas, human pheromones, and olfactory territories as ways to narrate social realities. Her works invite us to smell the city, to confront sweat, fear, desire—those things that art usually doesn’t represent.
In my own work, I’m interested in how organic materials—woods, oils, mineral pigments—emit scents that activate other levels of perception. The studio has its own fragrance, a blend of wax, dust, and varnish. That scent is also part of the piece, even if unintentionally.
A sense hard to control
One reason why smell has been little explored in the visual arts is its unpredictability.
Unlike sound or light, scent can’t be easily focused or limited. It spreads, mixes, changes depending on temperature or space. It’s volatile, rebellious, deeply contextual. This creates natural resistance in the art system, which tends to seek stability and repeatability.
An olfactory artwork can’t be easily archived or transported without alterations. This makes it fragile in the market’s eyes and, consequently, in institutions’.
Does smelling mean remembering or imagining?
What’s fascinating about scent is that it doesn’t just refer to the past. It can also suggest what has never been, activate imagination, trigger free associations. An artificial, invented scent can make us think of possible futures, of nonexistent bodies, of utopian landscapes.
In this sense, olfactory art can act as speculative poetics. What would a 22nd-century sculpture smell like? What scent would an invisible performance leave behind? These questions push the limits of artistic language and force us to think beyond the image.
Reconfiguring aesthetic experience
Perhaps one of the most interesting contributions of incorporating smell into art is that it forces us to abandon passive contemplation. One cannot smell without becoming involved.
The body enters the scene: we breathe, approach, close our eyes to concentrate. The experience becomes more immersive, more present.
This change in attitude can reshape not only how we perceive art but also how we produce it. Thinking about a piece from scent implies a different kind of listening, a more open and sensory disposition, less rationalized.
Smell in dialogue with other senses
Incorporating smell doesn’t mean displacing sight or hearing, but enriching the sensory palette of art. Many olfactory pieces work better when combined with image, sound, or touch. The key lies in balance, in avoiding spectacle to focus on what is meaningful.
Intersensoriality, increasingly present in contemporary art, allows senses to blend, enhance, and overflow. Smelling an installation may also mean seeing it differently. Listening to a scent may sound absurd, but in art, such paradoxes open worlds.
A field to be explored
There is much left to do. We lack vocabulary, prepared spaces, theory.
But precisely for that reason, smell in contemporary art is fertile and open territory where new languages can still be invented. The challenge is to dare.
Faced with a culture saturated with images, returning to the body, to its fragilities, to its ability to smell, can be a way to recover art as vital experience. Not as spectacle, but as shared breath.
Keep exploring
If you’re interested in this subject, I invite you to continue reading on my art blog, where I reflect on other ways of creating from the sensory, the material, and the intimate.
Because sometimes, art is also something we smell.
